The US Supreme Court effectively prohibited university admissions officers from giving preferential treatment to applicants based on their race this sum🍌mer.
Many medical-school leaders decried the high court’s ruling, claiming the ban will lead to less diversity within their studen༺t bodies, a less diverse crop of phyܫsicians and worse outcomes for minority patients.
But it’s not clear diversity within the physician workforce imꦕproves pat🌺ient outcomes — which ought to be the primary objective of medical education.
In fact, there’s evidence affirmative-action policies can harm patients as well as asp𓆉iring doctors themselv♏es.
It’s an article of faith among affirmative action’s defenders that a more diverse physician workforce benefits patients.
In her dissent from the majority’s ruling, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that affirmative action helps increase “the number of students from underrepresented backgrounds” ജwho become doctors, which in turn “improves ‘healthcare access and health outcomes in medically underserved communities.’”
The Association of American Medical Colleges echoed Sotomayor, saying it was “deeply disappointed” in the majority’s ruling, which “demonstrates a lack of understanding of the critical benefits of racial and ethnic diversity.”
“This decision will hasten the deaths of Black people in this country and we already die prไematurely,” Advancing Health Equity founder and physician Uché Blackstock blasted.
They’re referring in part to a handful of studies showing black Americans post better health outcomes when treated by black doctors.
But researcher Ian Kingsbury recently examined those studies’ methodologies and concluded that “systematic reviews” have “found ‘no relationship’ or ‘mixed results’ between race/ethnicity and quality of communication and ‘inconclusive’ evidence for patient outcomes.”
Admissions officers’ obsessive focus on race often causes them to ignore applicants’ academic and clinical aptitude — with dire consequences for the applicants themselves and ultimately the patients they treat.
Affirmative-action policies seek to give underrepresented groups a leg up in th♉e admissions process.
By design, that means admitting applicants who likely ⛄would have been rejected based on their test scores and grade-point averages alone.
From 2013 to 2016, 56% of black applicants and 31% of Hispanic applicants with below-average Medical College Admission Test scores and undergraduate GPAs were admitted to medical school, compared with just 8% of white applicants and 6% of Aไsian applicants with similar scores and GPAs.
It has been exhaustively documented that undergraduate “GPAs and MCAT total scores are strong predictors of academic performance in medical school through graduation,” as one study from the Association of American Medical Colleges itself put it.
In other words, affirmative action might help underqualified applicants get into med school.
But it won’t necessarily keep them there.
Black medical school students drop out, citing academic problems, at a rat�🔯�e 10 times higher than white students.
It’s cruel — not compassionate — to admit students who aren’t qualified for the intellectual rigors of medical school.
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It sets them up for failure, saddles them with deb𒆙t they could have avoided and wastes resources that could have gone towar🦋ds training qualified applicants who will actually practice medicine.
Worst of all, admitting undeꦍrqualified students ultimately h��urts patients.
“MCAT scores are predictive of student performance” on both Step 1 and Step 2 of the US Medical Licensing Examination, concluded one 2016 study.
Those licensing exams, in turn, ar🌄e indicative of students’ skill at treating patients during their clinical rotations.
“USMLE scores have a positive linear association with clinical performance as a medical student,” noted a 2019 study, “even after correcting for 𝓰gender, institution, and test-taking ability.”
The relationsh🔜ip holds after students graduate, complete residencies and become practicing physicians.
A 2014 study of US-licensed doctors who trained overseas found that “after adjustment for severity of illness, physician characteristics, and hospital char✃acteristics, performance on Step 2” had “a statistically significant inverse relationship with mortality. Each additional point on the examination was associated with a 0.2% decrease in mortality.”
The purpose of medic🌜al school is not to maximize divers🐷ity.
It’s to transform America’s best and brightest students into the most competent physicians possible, no matter their race, gender or any other demographic consideration.
Doctors hold people’s lives in their hands.
It should not matter what color those hands are.
Sally C. Pipes is president, CEO and Thomas W. Smith fellow in health-care policy at the Pacific Research Institute and founder and chairman of the Benjamin Rush Institute. Her latest book is “False Premise, False Promise: The Disastrous Reality of Medicare for All.”
Twitter: @sallypipes
